I am a Mutualist?

Unfortunately like with every other left wing egalitarian political movement, anarchy has been divided into branches. I put the emphasis on division because that is exactly what has happened; we have become so focused in the detail of how to get the complex workings of society “right” we have lost vision of the general picture of moving into a more equal society. So I am asked from time to time by other anarchists which branch of anarchy I subscribe to, my usual answer to this is mutualism. There are actually very few significant differences between different branches of anarchism...

Mutualism works on the theory that no one individual can own any more property that they themselves can work. As soon as they require another person to work with them in a business that business must become a mutual. So any of the profits are equally divided depending on how much work is put in. Essentially mutualism envisages a world in which resides no CEOs, no bosses and no governments. Mutualism still uses a supply and demand model and appeals to many anarchists because of its true free market ideas. At the moment free market ideas have got a bad reputation because they are synonymous with neo liberal/conservative policies of privatisation and it has become associated with images of Rupert Murdoch. However we are not in a free market at all. When a “free market” becomes dominated by one or two companies who own everything there is no freedom, gone are the days when it is easy for the local entrepreneur to start up a successful business.  That is why everything the usual “free marketers” the conservatives of the world say make me sick, because they are hypocrites. They want to shrink the size of government and award more liberties only when it suits them, exemplified by the anti-abortion, anti-legalization of drugs agenda of the Republican Party in the US.

Supply and demand. What happens when the demanders can’t afford to pay? Any society that is driven by supply and demand (not just capitalism) is made up of benefactors, your status as a benefactor is made by your capability to donate money to a charity or to donate money back into society without the gain of any material goods, so for example donating money to a hospital to a school. If all the benefactors give as much money as they can to charities then generally the healthier the society. The work that charities do is often an unseen great value to society but because the people or objects at the receiving end of the charity are deemed as not usually money making, the actual work that is carried out by the charities is often seen as – in terms of making money – valueless. So what happens when these benefactors hoard all the wealth for themselves and refuse to give any back? Well we get vast inequality as we are experiencing at the moment. Of course charities or donations are not the only way to give back to society. There is also just general shopping and involvement in society, which the more wealth gets centralized the less money will be going in to high street shops and the like because there are less people with greater amounts of wealth. Obviously two people don’t need as many clothes, as much food as 200 people with the same amount of wealth no matter how much they consume. A supply and demand economy will only work if everyone has the same sort of buying power, and that can only happen in a world without bosses hoarding more money from the company they own than the workers. In short, supply and demand will make everything about money.

The life of a charity is at the best of times fraught and at the worst of times damaging. In effect the concept of charities are pretty bad, even the fact that they are called charities is making people who work for them feel as though they are leaching off society, would it not be better than rather a charity have to fight for funding for a particular project, for the people to have the money already and do the charitable work off their own backs and still have money to support themselves?

All of the points mentioned above is where my thinking has taken me to preferring the anarcho-communist idea that society should provide for everyone regardless of their contribution to that society

 “All things for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men worked to produce them in the measure of their strength, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone's part in the production of the world's wealth... All is for all!” – Peter Kropotkin.

 For who in society should judge what contribution is deemed fit to reap the benefits of society? Is that not exactly the type of authority we seek to escape? Furthermore if every person got paid a basic amount (I shall come back to this point later) enough to live off then they would truly have the freedom to do whatever they want, within reason. Critics of this system have said that this promotes laziness but I strongly disagree, apart from the old rhetoric that humans have an undying need to do things with their life, they will also be able to do things that they want and not what is dictated of them by markets. For example is looking after orphans useful to society? Yes. Then why should people be stopped from doing that just because there is no one to fund the project. And anyway if a few people (because under the system of everyone receiving a basic income “lazy” people would in no way be the majority) do become “lazy” then should we not just pity the fact they are doing nothing with their lives rather than use some false motivational system of punishment to try and get them to work?

Before any society can develop in anyway the people who make up that society need to develop. The society is only as peaceful and equal/ destructive and violent as the people within that society, so if – like at the moment – people are stressed constantly, over worked, angry in general then can we expect the same of that society. The anarchist communist idea I described above would enable people to help themselves. I described an idea above saying that every person should get paid a basic amount, how this is done depends completely upon in what sort of society you are in. If you are in a society similar to which people are in nowadays that relies on the exchange of money for goods then yes a basic amount should be paid out, however this would be hard to administer and to carry out as this raises the question of who should be in charge of paying out the money. However if you are in a goods society then that individual should just be given enough food, enough clothes and access to societal based things, e.g. libraries, museums etc. for the individual to live in personal comfort.

There are two mains ways of deciding how the people get this basic wage. The first, my least favourite of the ways, is to set up a community council similar to federalist structures (I shall talk about this in a later post) which would centralize the wealth in some way specific to the community. You may question the point of getting rid of a government run council in the first place; however their only task would be to administer this distribution of wealth and the council would be operated by direct democracy. The second is my more preferred decentralized access to wealth. Essentially let the people administer the wealth for themselves. This would be hard to keep a count of in a monetary based society, but in a goods society the people would just go and take whatever they wanted. Both of the systems have their flaws and the latter idea partly relies on faith in people not to be greedy, however I don’t think greed would be as big a factor as some people would like to assume.

I also believe in a constitution to protect people’s liberties. This is not to say I am a minarchist, rather that I believe a set of rules should be written up for each individual to follow to make sure they don’t end up economically enslaved or loose liberties as can often happen when one doesn’t pay attention to their liberties. These laws shall be enforced by no one other than the individuals themselves and the only reason for writing them up is to make sure no one forgets them over time. I have thought of just a few rules for the moment (but feel free to suggest more ideas): No one shall be allowed to be employed to fight for you or protect you (this is how private armies are formed). It shall be illegal for any individual to own more land (property) than they personally can work.

So in reality I am more than a mutualist, I fuse points from nearly every strand of anarchism while adding a few ideas of my own, but in reality no one is a "true" anything anyway, no one will have the exact same ideas as the starter of that movement. Saying I am a mutualist is just easier than saying all of that when ever someone asks me what type of anarchist I am.

Capitalism

"All money is a matter of belief" - Adam Smith

Capitalism works on a basis of boom and bust cycles. So at times there will be boom years where times are good, people find themselves richer and manage to forget about the impending bust years. Now the boom years I don't have a problem with, just the bust years. Which as more reputable sources such as Karl Marx have said, is unavoidable in a capitalist system. This is to do with over supply, inflation, the psychology of capitalism, the greater fool theory (the idea that there will always be a bigger fool out there of whom you can make more money out of) and the fragility of the whole system. Things which no matter how much you regulate capitalism will always come together to cause frequent recessions.

I am not going to rant on about the failings of capitalism since I assume if you are reading this blog you already appreciate the need for an alternative to capitalism. but I will say: Capitalism is purely unsustainable - it is just plain wrong to ever base institutions around money. The free market based world that we live in today allows organizations with the most money to unfortunately have the largest voice and thus usually by default the largest power base. Now institutions represent the number of people who work for those institutions. True for nearly everything, but with one exception. Banks, banks are the heart of capitalism. We entrust them with our money for them to go and invest in other things. Now banks investing in business's I have no problem with, because what they invest in and how much can always be regulated. Although today we let the banks have free reign of everything. The problem I do have with capitalism - which as far as I can see can not change no matter how much you regulate banks - is that when it comes to banks getting their voice heard, because they have the most money, (because they are the ones who actually create the money) they have the loudest voice. And as a result any capitalist government will keep on giving them more and more power, further allowing big business/big banks to take control of our lives, and before we know it we end up like America.

"Capitalism can be sustainable" I hear some straggling reformists shout? No it cannot be, some people think that just because a sustainable system works with money it must be capitalism, it is not, I have also heard some people claim that an end to capitalism would mean an end to business. Which is just too absurd to even seriously contemplate. But these are the views that we anti-capitalists are up against. It seems the mainstream media has successfully brushed the failings of capitalism under the carpet and implanted false views into peoples minds.

Capitalism promotes the cult of self, which in turn promotes individualism. "The traits that can be seen in cult of self societies are parallel to those traits that can be seen in psychotic killers: superficial charm, grandiosity and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation; a penchant for lying, deception and manipulation; and the incapacity for remorse or guilt." - Anonymous. The purporaters of this "society" even encourage and create the belittting of fellow people in this celebrity driven soicety that now finds itself leading us, dragging us by our tongues; managing to pull us along with it and at the same time silencing us. It is no secret that this version of capitalism is wildly unsustainable. To keep up this level of luxury that the rich of the "developed" world are so accustomed to, we need to keep those poor people in Africa/Asia/South America who so desperately want to live in basic humanity in that level of extreme poverty.

Capitalism is like a pyramid with the poorest of the poor living at the bottom and the richest of the rich living at the top. This pyramid does not rely on geography but rather complex systems of ruthfulness, luck and individualism. If the people at the bottom of the pyramid choose to pull out and start  their own little self sustaining communities, which I am completely in favour of them doing - they have more than enough resources - then the western world would crumble. Inflation would go through the roof. Governments would not know what to do at all. And in all likeliness chaos would insue. Because the exploited population at the bottom of the pyramid is so large in proportion to the rich at the top relatively few would have to opt out of this system for this chaos to ensue. This has led many people to think that capitalism drives a war not only for profit but also to keep the exploiteds' minds on something other than the fact they are being exploited.

Capitalism is not only bad for the exploited but also bad for the exploitees.

In an unexploited version of society there could be no upper/rich class. It just would not work because comparitve materialistic wealth thrives on exploitation. However I think everyone could live as what we now deem middle class. Everyone contributes to society just enough as a "middle class" to keep the whole thing moving.

Capitalism at the moment, in the form of CDSs CDOs and the like are the mind games of bankers. The derivative market literally creates money out of thin air. It is estimated that the real wealth in this world at the moment is somewhere in the region of 70 Trillion USD. That is money that you can actually feel and is in circulation at the moment. But up to 10x this amount is tied up in property and business. And up to 1000 trillion USD is tied up in derivative markets. This money however no one will see. It is just for the mega rich to trade about in space, existing in nothing more than on a few computer screens and in the belief that it is there. The most upsetting thing about this is for me is that wars are based on this completely fictional money, peoples lives are ruined. If people want to play games with imaginary money then yea let them. Its no concern of mine if they just want to waste their time. But to let these people affect so many other peoples lives? To let them rule the world and do what ever they want? Something is deeply wrong there.

Capitalism rewards consumerism and punishes quality. Capitalism, to keep up with over production creates consumerism. If companies create products that are built to last are inevitably punished. They quite often go bankrupt. For example the company Crocs is at the moment in trouble financially. Even though pretty much everyone's got some, or at least knows someone who has got some. They are still failing because the shoes last for so long not enough people are making repeat buys. They have been flirting with bankruptcy for quite a few months now. So they are faced with a choice. Go bankrupt or down grade the quality of their shoes. Hmm no points for guessing which option they will choose.

Interest drives debt. You might think the interest that you pay on loans is vital for banks to stay afloat? In fact it is quite the opposite, and can quite often lead to their downfall. There is an international bank and when countries borrow money they too have to pay interest on their loans, just like us. But what happens at that point is that since only that international bank can lend to countries, it is pretty much controlling the money supply for the world. This means that in order to pay their interest they have to borrow more money. The country then theoretically cannot escape this cycle then because there is no where to get interest free money from so they need to print more money. Therefore we have a irremovable deficit, and debt will constantly be created in all parts of society as the governments try to use "clever" mechanisms to get the people to pay off the loans of the money they had to borrow in the first place.

I do have a bit more to say on capitalism, but these are the most important points I think. I don't often like to complain about systems, rather offer an alternative. It just seems there's a lot of confusion about capitalism at the moment. Over the centuries we have have numerous chances to enter an alternative system. Mainly these opportunities have been found in various bad recessions as people see the down side to capitalism. As we slowly start to recover from this recession I fear we shall miss a big opportunity to find something different.

GMOs

Genetically Modified Organisms

My main quarrel with GMO’s is in fact not directly against GMOs (obviously I have lots of littler but equally important quarrels with GMO's). I believe that humans should always be trying to advance science and develop science that is useful to us. My problem mainly with GMOs is rooted in a nasty habit that has seemed to of developed into a human trait: the need to control nature. The majority of humans and normally the ruling elite have always tried to control nature. It seems to be rooted in capitalisms thought process, that we as humans should get what we want when we want. We have invented fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and the lot to try and control nature. Get it to do what we want it to do, but the one fatal flaw in this methodology/religion is that nature is and always will be the bigger player. We don’t control it; we are part of it and therefore responsible for keeping our part of the ecology cycle going round and round.

There has emerged an argument in recent times that GM has the potential to save millions of lives, but so does permaculture, organic living and clean fresh water, and they are a lot less bureaucratic, a lot cheaper and we have been sitting on these “technologies” for thousands of years. I usually describe myself as a reformist revolutionary but in this case I will settle for nothing less than a full revolution and that is an organic permacultural revolution. 

The way that GM is being forced on us at the moment is the most damaging to our lives. It is being pushed through by corporations as opposed to freelance scientists and independent institutions, as any good technology should be. Giving corporations the driving power of a new technology is dangerous because they are just looking to make as much profit from it as they can. Therefore they are not doing nearly enough research into long term effects of GM on humans or nature because research would take “valuable” time and money.

The reason I point out that permaculture is a lot less bureaucratic than GM (as if it isn't obvious) is because recently – and a trend I think we shall start to see a bit more of – a lot of companies, Monsanto namely, have taken to making the seeds on their “product” plants infertile so that farmers will have to buy more seeds the next year. This is not only unfair to farmers but this is also incredibly short sited and quite immature. Imagine for a second if you will that it is 50 years into the future. All the farmers in the world have switched on to producing GM foods, all the seeds are infertile but because everybody is being told we would all be dead of starvation if it weren’t for this new GM technology the farmers don’t put up much of a fuss and so go on happily buying their new seeds every year. Then one day a disaster strikes, say a nuclear reactor blows up and kills all of the scientists who make these seeds. Suddenly there is no one left to make all of these new seeds. The reason, Monsanto say, they are making their seeds infertile is that the plants that they have genetically designed are their property and they are just loaning it to farmers. So to plant seeds from the next generation would be like stealing. Therefore logically a safeguard should of course be put in place to stop this heinous crime and make it so that farmers can’t use the seeds. Oh so logical don’t you think?

Ever since the industrial revolution, we have been mucking about with nature in a big way. We have been polluting the earth in nearly every way we can. Shooting pollutants up into the air and into the floor which causes an endless amount of trouble, we have been putting billions of tons of plastic into the ocean for about 50 years and we have been draining the water tables as fast as possible. All of this has created many problems; arguably the biggest is man-fed global warming. Now global warming has been sped up by humans because we have physically being messing nature up. Imagine what could happen if we genetically start fiddling about with nature? I shudder to think.

I am not saying humans shouldn’t experiment with GM foods, because some of the best creations come out of experimenting with something entirely different. I am saying that these experiments should be conducted deep down underground where not a single grain of pollen should be allowed to see the natural light of day. Because if a GM farm starts up in a certain area, organic farms are legally not allowed to call themselves organic farms because the bees that pollinate both farms will undoubtedly mix the GM with the non GM pollen.

The upcoming onslaught of GM foods that we face will slowly force everyone to GM. As GM masterminds inject the latest chemical into their crops to repel bugs we shall also slowly see the emergence of resistant bugs to certain chemicals. Rendering organic pesticides (most which have been in use for thousands of years, and work just fine) and non organic pesticides worse than useless. As a result of this the amount of pesticides used will have to be upped, damaging not only our health and the environment even more but also the financial situation of non GM using farmers. These farmers will eventually either switch to GM, or just crash and burn since they will be spending so much money on pesticides. We then very quickly find ourselves in a situation where we do not have so much as a say in whether we eat GM or not, and this voice that we could have is slipping away all the time, Monsanto are lobbying for further deregulation of untested GM products and as I am writing this (01/03/2011) grains and seeds being imported into Europe to feed livestock do not need to be labelled.

How many of you have heard of Bacillus Thuringien? It is a chemical that is found in soil and has now been transplanted into NewLeaf potatoes which are a new Monsanto creation. The Bt chemical can produce a toxin that is lethal to the deadly Colorado potato beetle. The Colorado beetle once it infects a farm will wipe out an entire crop of Russets (which the NewLead potato is based on). The funny thing is that we humans have had the knowledge for thousands of years of how to combat this Colorado beetle. Simply grow plants around the field that the beetle doesn’t like. Therefore there will be no reason for the beetle to then enter the field. Or, an even better idea: since the beetle only goes for russets, don’t plant them in such a concentrated way, this way the Colorado beetle will not be able to find them as easily. Bt has never been in the human diet before, apart from when you dine on the occasional soil as a baby or the little bit of soil that, no matter how hard you wash and spin you’re handpicked salad that dirt will always find its way back into the salad bowl. Now because of NewLeaf potatoes Bt will be for the first time in our diets in a significant way (or at least the diets of those who eat NewLeafs’) and typically Monsanto have not done any research into what the long term effects will be of having a completely new chemical in our diet.

 

Organic farming has had the knowledge of how to feed people successfully for tens of thousands of years. So why instead of listening to organic ideas do humans insist on starting from scratch and trying to work out and build new non organic infrastructure? Because a) the whole idea behind organic farming is working with nature so therefore the need for humans to control everything is made redundant and b) there is not as much profit to be made for the high ups of pesticide companies and now more recently Monsanto. But hey all in the name of profit right? I have heard the recent population boom given as a reason of why we need to turn to GM, but that is simply not the case. If there were an organic food revolution then everyone can live easily on organic food. Obviously our essential outlook needs to shift dramatically in the way we do farming today for this to happen. There needs to be a radical and fast decentralization of farming. I am not saying everyone needs to become a farmer, but there should be at least one if not five farms for every 1,000 people. OCA and aboutmyplanet, as well as others have estimated organic food can easily support 10 billion people, and using permaculture techniques can easily support 20 billion.

Finally to all you GM advocators who are still not convinced that GM is a bad thing, what do you say to the string of studies that show that GM crops produce no higher yields than their counterparts*? Are you really saying that GM can give us more nutritional value than organic foods? Are you really saying that GM is a better – or has the potential to be a better – system of farming than permaculture, a tried, tested and proven method that has been in use for the past thousands of years?

GM is nothing more than an attempt by big corporations to centralize our farming even more, which is damaging to the human race, not only through the creation of disease that big centralized farms bring, but also weakens food security and increases needless bureaucracy. It is moving us away every day from the organic farming we should be practising, and if global warming and out of control capitalism is not the end of us first then I assure you GM foods will be.

*The adoption of bioengineered crops. Jorge FernandezCornejo and William D. McBride, US Department of Agriculture Report, May 2002, http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/aer810/aer810.pdf

*Glyphosate-resistant soyabean cultivar yields compared with sister lines. Elmore, R.W. et al. Agronomy Journal, Vol.  93, No. 2, 2001, pp. 408–41

*Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops. Doug Gurian-Sherman, Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009, http://tiny.cc/eqZST

The System Of Order In A Perfect Society

This society takes ideas from all different schools of anarchism - with the exception of anarco-capitalism all concepts of anarchism can be found, or have the potential to be found, within this society. At the moment this society can only be found in a few people’s minds and probably some far off lands, but hopefully in the future this society will become reality and common place. I have partly addressed already how to best move into an anarchist society would be through the use of communes. These communes would be completely different to how we live life now. People would only be doing jobs that are vital for survival and they would hopefully be moneyless societies of about 60 - 150 people in size. Obviously the size can be completely different, this is just a guideline. These communes would prepare people for community living for when the government crumbles and anarchism stands. By developing a more community based approach to society the hope would be that the people would be able to, as soon as the government crumbles connect all together and anarchisticly run everything. But what does it mean to anarchisticly run something?

I think the best and most efficient way to anarchisticly run something is through the anarcho-communist idea. This idea would run everything from the bottom up rather than the massively top down approach we have to everything at the moment. The idea would be that you have a series of councils and delegates. Imagine levels of councils, at the bottom (this is in no way saying the least influential, on the contrary the most important) the people. So one community, a neighbourhood say, would be a council itself, say for examples sake that all community councils are made up of 100 people. One level above that would be a borough style council. Which would be a collection of all the community delegates in a certain area in one meeting. I would say no more that 21 councils should be in a borough, to keep things simple, but again this is just a guideline, in practicality just remember to go with whatever works sustainably (when I say sustainably I do not mean like systems that “work” nowadays but are really just going to crash on us in the future: for example, how banks are managed at the moment). All of the borough councils would be geographically organised so there would be no communities joining together solely out of common interests (as this is how powerful interests are born). Up from a borough council there would be a regional council. The size of all council meetings above the community level would depend on what the meeting was about and how many communities it affected. A council meeting cannot be held without all the members (whether communities or individuals) it affects being notified. If communities decide not to show up for the meetings they abstain. Only in extreme cases would there ever be a "national" council (obviously because within an anarchistic society there would be no nations this would just depend on how big the mass of land was that the people inhabited, for example what is now England, Scotland and Wales would all be one national council, Ireland would be its own national council). All councils above the level of community councils would only have meetings when they are necessary. So borough meetings would be uncommon, regional meetings would be almost unheard of and National councils would only be assembled if for example another "country" of people decided to invade your land mass by force. Any meetings above that of the community level would be made up of delegates. So what exactly is a delegate?

Delegates are, simply put, representatives. These delegates would be selected by a rota system, so everyone would have to be a delegate at some point, and no-one could be a delegate three times while someone else has only been a delegate once. You can only be a delegate for one meeting before it is the next persons turn. If a community - or someone within a community - has any reason to doubt a person as being a delegate, then they can voice their opinion and a general consensus will be taken by the community as to whether the potential delegate is fit to act as a delegate. Although I would warn against this as this is a big betrayal of trust in an anarchist society and can cause unnecessary divides. Before a meeting made up of delegates takes place the list of discussion topics will be sent around to all the communities, so they can tell their delegate exactly what to say. So all the decisions that have to be made at a council of delegates will have already been made before hand. The delegates just meet to debate the ideas of the community they are representing. A minute taker, also from the same community council of the delegate, would always attend a meeting alongside a delegate. They would not speak, just take the minutes of whatever the delegate is talking about so it can be shown to the community after the meeting. The community can then decide if they have been happy with how the delegate has acted. Both the minute taker and the delegate would change every meeting. The selection process of delegates and minute takers would be totally random. If the votes in a delegate meeting are equal so there is a 50/50 split. The status quo will be maintained.

The world is always changing, if you don't like it at the moment, mould it in to something you like for the future.

Picture an area the size of London, I have no idea how many people would be in this area in an anarchist society but let’s say it’s roughly 5 million people. Of course I do not see how cities would fit into an anarchist society. There would be no reason for people to amalgamate in such a way as to form a city. Now if there was ever a decision that had to be made affecting the all of the people in that area of “London” then everyone would need to have a say. Imagine the decision was to build a nuclear reactor somewhere in "London" of which the potential spill out of that nuclear reactor – should it break – be big enough to seriously affect the people and potentially kill them. Everyone would of course have to have a say in this. But imagine the meeting without delegates that would be held to make that decision. 5 million people would all have to try and squeeze into one meeting place and make themselves heard. The voting would take forever, it would be too confusing and no one would ever get things done. A delegates’ job is simply to cut down on the number of people. A delegate would hold 2 pieces of information. One would be the general consensus of the people, so if 70 out of the 100 people in the community voted yes to the nuclear power plant, the delegate would vote yes. The second piece of information would be the make-up of how many people voted for it in their community. So if when the decision by all the delegates was unanimously yes then that would mean the overwhelming majority of the individuals in all of the communities combined had voted yes. But it also means that if the vote is quite close. Say anything from a 65%-35% split on the vote to a 51%-49% split then all the delegates would have to show the individual vote make-up of their communities. In this case the individuals votes (as opposed to the community's' votes) would then be counted, and it could appear that the majority of people actually want to vote no, and the proposal will not pass. In the present voting system we have of First Past The Post, quite a lot of people fall into this trap and we quite often end up with leaders who have not got the majority vote. This process will take a long time I know, but to quote the EZLN "This is the speed of democracy".

Anything not made by humans cannot be owned.

Everyone would have to attend these council meetings and everyone would be a part of the councils, there would be no discrimination based on mental health or anything else. This system proves that things absolutely can be done in an anarchist society. There is absolutely no authority in any of the councils and very little chance, I think, for corruption. This is just an image of my perfect society and of course people can in reality do whatever they want. I think at the start of an anarchist society there would be quite a bit of opting out of the community council system and we would see the starting up of more primitive-anarchist and individual-anarcho communes of their own. This would not mean however that these communities would not have a say in the nuclear power plant example mentioned above. It just means they would choose not to run their communes on this basis. Some critics I have heard have said this system creates an environment of individualism and tribe like mentalities. I think that assessment is a load of rubbish. In reality people will still be living together in the bigger village or whatever they live in. And because all important decisions that affect other communities would have to be made by "borough" councils there could be little passive aggressive political warfare created between different communities. Also with the creation of the New People (see my People's Liberty entry) everyone would in theory be able to get on.

A Call For Unity Between The Left

The right-wing is an amalgamation of "moderates" - whom you must see nearly every day - to the downright stupid, such as Sarah Palin and James Dellingpole. The key difference between the moderates and the extreme right-wingers (who don’t have to be as extreme or stupid as Sarah Palin) is that moderates believe that the free market is the best way this world can be run and therefore call for the deregulation of it in a bid to help people and let people "earn their own way in life". Which even if you believe that is completely naive (which I do) it is still noble as they think they are helping the people. The extreme right-wingers however want nothing more than to keep the rich and elite in power without caring a damn for the average person. A type of fascism indeed. But the thing that gets to me the most is that with the exception of a few out spoken and clearly imbecilic twats the right is very much in unity. Even if a semi fascist senator in America gets in to power it is better that a democrat getting in, in their eyes.

That is the thing that I most admire about the right, while you have people on the left slandering all other types of lefties whose views they don’t completely agree with. The right has nothing bad to say really about anyone else on the right (apart from the extreme few), and this is what I want for the left. With the rise of fascism in America (and indeed here in Britain) there has never been more of an important time for the left to unite against the common enemy and try and actually combat the right with all its force. We shall best do this on the streets, on the internet, in the media and through education. We will confront them in the debate rooms of any type and expose the truth that conservatism is regressive to humanity and is not be the best system to base life on.

The reason I say there has never been more of an important time to fight right-wingers - as some would argue the second world war was a much more important time to not just stop right-wingers but fascism - is that many people now don’t realise the growth of the right and the massive assent to power it has achieved. As corporate America is sucking Americans out from under government liberalism and placing them under capitalist regulation (all thanks to the oh so wonderful policies of the right) sometimes even moderate liberal Americans can find them saying no to things like immigration laws, health care reform and fairer votes. Because democrats are in power (sort of) most americans and other people from other countries feel America is swinging much more to the left and some claim towards "socialism". This however is completely the opposite. The controlling system (which is capitalism) is now so in control that the only way politicians can bring it back under control and therefore thrust the power back into the "peoples" (their) hands is by slaming through laws and legislation to regulate it, which of course will never be allowed by the right, it is a vicious circle. Even we in Britain have seen the rise of the right wing press: the daily mail is now the biggest internet news page in the world and we are still fighting off Murdoch from engulfing yet more of our press. Although I feel very fortunate in saying that our press is no-where near as bad as America. Most of Europe has also seen a rise in the right, and russia has even seen the rise of neo nazis. Mexico has seen the rise of "Peace and Justice" group which is completely the opposite as to what its name suggests, and the list goes on...

Fortunately with the recent crash of capitalism people have started thinking outside of capitalism and trying to turn towards other economic models that we the people can prosper in, not just the bankers. I think this will slowly come to a halt as we exit the recession and start onto the next boom years. That is why the left, must organize and unite while there is still time, because personally I don't want to wait for the next recession for people to start thinking again about how bad and unsustainable capitalism is. I am not saying that all quarrels will go away between the left, but if we can all focus on a common goal of beating off the rightwing ethos and austerity measures that are gripping the world then we will be much more a force to reckon with. Just try to appreciate where different people are coming from, and unless it quite clearly cannot work i.e capitalism or conservatism then keep your mind open to the fact that it may be a possible way. The reason I say capitalism and conservatism cannot work, is that we have experienced thousands of years in both, I think that if a system has been given millennia to prove if it works and it still doesn't it is safe enough to rule it out as working. I am not saying that we should stop listening to capitalists and conservatives’ points of view, but it is more important to debate a new kind of system rather than try to keep on reforming the current system.

So if you are a believer of Bakunin, next time you see a Marxist don’t instantly tell them why they are wrong, debate with them and try to open their mind to why their ideas are flawed. If you follow the path of Kropotkin don’t become aggressive towards a Trotskyite instead embrace them. After all, the left wing do all have the same common goal. To make life better for the average person. 

People's Liberty

Some people say that oppressing the people more, or harming them (in the form of chucking bombs at them for example) will make the people more politically motivated to bring about a revolution and completely free them from the shackles of the state. They argue this will avoid any reformist moves to compensate and give the people superficial liberty thus suppressing the people with their own naivety into thinking they're free. While this may be true about the motivation, it motivates the people very superficially, makes them desperate to escape the regime and in some cases it can actually turn them away from the cause the properganderists by the deed are trying to turn them on to. For example in spain in the late 1800s - which has historically been quite an anarchisticly influenced country - anarchism suffered horribly because anarchists were promoting violence though propaganda by the deed.

I was talking with an anarchist the other day and he said that apartheid should of not been ended in the way that it was. I was quite shocked and so i pressed him for more details, he then said that if apartheid had been allowed to continue (no pressure from the west etc) then the black people probably would of risen up and very quickly started a revolution, instead, he said that reformist measures were put into place and things haven't improved greatly for black people in south Africa. Very true and things still aren't great for black people in south Africa, but if apartheid had lasted up untill now that would of been much more suffering than would of been necessary. No one apart from people in that position (and even then they can't force it) can even dare to ask other people to stay in that position for a bit longer. I believe that it is necessary to educate people at any age. Educate them that it makes absolutely no sense to hate on other people full stop. Let alone because of someone's skin colour. Educate a way of peace for the world and make them see that the advancment of the human race, whether personal or global, should be put above all other matters.

I believe that instead of opressing the people to force them into a revolutionary style situation you should work on giving them personal liberty*, whether that is through reformist governments or starting up communes from under the watchful eye of the state. When personal liberty is achieved most people will inevitably forget about over throwing the state as things like mass media and activities in everyday life take over. It is then the job of the people who still care about over throwing the state to draw people back to that idea and show them why having a state is bad and why an anarchist society would be better. It is then up to the people to decide what to do. Afterall the main principal of anarchism is to not force your opinions and ideas on other people. So you can't suddenly force other people to live without a state is they dont want to. 

Anarchists do have to take pretty hard measures sometimes to get people to listen to our message. We are up against some hard opponents when it comes to propaganda. The whole of the main stream media will always as a rule of thumb be against anarchism and pro-state. There might also be social reasons for someone not to support anarchism, for example they might fear being blacklisted and therefore loose job oppertunities and the like. But anarchists' and the states' raison d'etre are rooted in completely different philosophies and, if you like, are in a constant state of war for peoples minds and support. The anarchists want whats best for the people and the state wants to conserve the power it holds while throwing a token of power to the people. This is not to say that people working for the state - for example opposition party mps - dont want to bring power to the people (for example caroline lucas the green mp for Brighton I would say definatly has the peoples' intrest at heart) but when they get into government they will inevitably be sucked up by the beauracracy and churned over by the system that is the state, regurgetated and moulded (usually by advisor's and the like) into someone who is so interested in international affairs and upholding the law of averages (see my first blog post) that they often ignore the people or inadvertantly take power away from the people.

What i would also say to those people who still believe that oppressing the people is the way to make them revolt (and revolt well) is look at case studies. For example russia has been under autocratic rule for centuries (and has only just calmed down to a mild dictatorship). Have the people revolted? Well yes, in the late 19th century to the 1920s but look at what happened then: because the people were in dictatorship before the revolution, the revolution was relativly disorganised and as a result got hijacked by several autocrats (ironically the only semi man of the people later being exiled in Mexico). Since the late 1910s there have not been any big revolutions there, and protests not big enough to bring down the government. All over the arab nation there has been sweeps of revolutions - or revolution type protests - recently (whether good or not only time will tell) that have shaken dictators out. The only thing is these dicators have been in power for decades mostly. Why are they only being kicked out now? Because the people sense a momentum and are very quickly choosing to move along with it. This was not sparked by years of oppression (although that's certainly the issue of why they are revolting) but instead from events from within Tunisia. They can feel the solidarity that has swept the arab people. And the western world is feeling the ripples off it as well.

How has it got to this stage in human life when the government can actually be accusing the people of hindering society and draining the resources. The people are only a reflection of the society they live in. So perhaps instead of coming down hard on these "thieves" they should actually be trying to change society that motivates people to work. I have already talked about how trying to force people to revolt will never end well. Trying to force people to work with threats of taking away their safety net only undermines peoples confidence and trust in society and only gets them superficially working. It may sound stupid but if people do not want to do something and you force them to, parts of society will crumble, it may look completely unrelated but the reason will be there. This is not just a crack at The ConDem government that is in now in power but also at New Labour and any other government that believes it can force people to get society moving.

I believe that every single human being has the qualities of greed and laziness, but only to some extent. What qualities we want to see in people needs to nurtured by society. That means that at the moment we are nurturing peoples materialistic, violent, greedy and lazy sides. I am not saying this is entirely the governments fault. but rather the failings of society as a whole. The one idea that I do think every anarchist should force upon the people is that, as long as it does not inflict negatively on other peoples lives, live however makes you happy. Other than that people are free to make up their own minds.

*I say personal liberty, I mean anything from the western european governments to complete anarchistic freedom

Introduction To Peaceful Anarchy

Anarchy is a peace movement.

This blog stems from the idea of bringing peace to the world, the belief that everyone should start off in this world equal to one another. After all we are all the same race, same life. I do not necessarily believe that power corrupts - as quite a few anarchists will say - as sometimes having an outlined and defined leader can be good, but it enables corruption very easily and in most cases (such as nearly every government in the world) promotes corruption. Just the idea of having a state, something so small controlling the masses who are relatively very large was never going to be a great success. In the best cases the state will regulate everything well, handle the economy well and overall be a pretty nice popular government. But these laws that we all more or less follow are created on a rule of averages, and because of this individual cases are not taken into consideration, thereby meaning that you have to abide by rules that are not in your best interests. Laws of averages simply mean legal (as opposed to lawful) laws that are created by popular consent, or what is deemed average in society i.e control orders, drug laws, immigration laws etc. Sometimes innocent people fall victim to these laws of averages and therefore an innocent life can be destroyed, a power which I believe nobody - whether a mass of people in the form of a government, or individual - should be allowed to have. A government in the worst case will oppress the people and get corrupted by the idea of having great amounts of power over masses, something which very few people (fascists) would ever want. We are seeing great amounts of oppression pretty much all over the world at the moment.

This blog is not tied to any organisations or any other blogs with similar names. This blog aims to bring anarchism into the everyday lives of people and hopes to develop anarchism as a viable idea and not something that is laughed at by the populist people and governments of today.

Anarchism is many things, there are many different schools of thoughts on anarchism and ideas are being tweaked all the time. Everytime a new true anarchist comes to light she or he will always want to tweak the ideas of their predecessors, sometimes improving them or not. Although the actual definition is a society without authority to me anarchism is also a peace movement. It is not tied to any particular classes, as some of the more communist influenced anarchist organisations might have you believe.

This blog shows one persons thoughts on what a perfect society would be, and in my own thoughts how best to get to that society, it may be idealistic, sometimes unbearably so, but you have to be idealistic, if you aren't you might as well blow your brains out. I do not expect people to have the same ideas as me and in some (most?) cases people will have completely different ideas to me. Everyone is entitled to their own views but I think it is a great tragedy when people close their minds off to all other view points before getting all the information in front of them first. This is not to say that you cannot have a view point if you don't know EVERYTHING - no one does - but just keep your mind open to change all the time. I appreciate that I do not know as much as other people and like everyone else I am still learning and developing my thoughts.

If you want to know everything about something you have to know everthing about everything. Everything is interconnected, nothing is totally individual.

Although I think that anarchy is the only way to truly liberate the people and the best way of life, it should still be the individuals choice, in other words they should not get forced into anarchy, as this can cause resentment and in some cases make individual lives worse. For example if they are not in the right mind set for anarchy or not prepared to adapt their work systems. I believe that anarchy needs to be evolved into, but not in the way that Marx talked about. He talked about the need to embrace the state and the evolution and development of the psychology of man into a New Man which would take society to new levels making an anarchisticly run society possible and viable. I believe Marx was right about many things, but not about this. In the developmental period of embracing the state I believe too much opportunity is created for corruption and power grabs. Don't get me wrong Marxism shows much potential for working. I just feel it gives too little power to the people and it takes too long, but then again that's just me.

The way I would evolve into anarchism, is by simply ignoring the state. This can be done in a number of ways. The most effective way would probably be to start up a commune (anarchisticly run of course) that runs on a moneyless basis, otherwise the government can butt in with tax obligation claims and the like. In starting the commune everyone would have to quit their job that links them to "normal" society, close bank accounts ect. Really anything that connects them to or benefits government run society. At the same time as slowly starving the government of people to control, the commune would start breeding generations of New People. These New People would be anarchisticly minded people who would be able to move seemlessly into a big connected anarchist society once the government gives up its futile control of people.

The most important issue in life, to me, is for everyone to have fun. Something which at the moment society doesn't seem to allow to happen As we go through stress after stress of everyday life, rarely stopping to watch our lives slip by as they do, we are told that this is modern life, that we shouldn't expect anything different let alone better. That is really what this blog is all about, trying to find a better, more relaxing, less bureaucratic way of life that keeps ones individual liberties intact.

Enjoy.